NEW YORK, Nov 2 — After Lou Reed died of liver disease on October 27, 2013, Rolling Stone wrote that he “fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry.”
His old friend Patti Smith, writing in The New Yorker, called him “our generation’s New York poet, championing its misfits as Whitman had championed its workingman and Lorca its persecuted.”
Laurie Anderson, his wife since 2008, described Reed in The East Hampton Star as “a tai chi master” who spent his last days on the South Fork “being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature.”
“Lou was a prince and a fighter,” she wrote.
On the latter point, at least, Anderson may overlap with Howard Sounes, the author of the controversial new Lou Reed biography, “Notes From the Velvet Underground: The Life of Lou Reed,” released in England last week, which paints a less-than-flattering portrait of Reed as a “monster” of a man, who used racial slurs, abused women and fought with fellow artists.
“He was constantly at war with people — with family, friends, lovers, band members, managers and record companies,” Sounes said in an interview last week. “He was a suspicious, cantankerous, bitter, angry man.”
“It was the worst-kept secret in show business,” he added.
While no one ever confused Reed for an Osmond, the Sounes book, part of a coming wave of Reed biographies, pushes the standard Reed narrative of the substance-addled, gender-confused avatar of cool into “Mommie Dearest” territory, portraying him as given to emotional and physical brutality, paranoid tantrums and acid-tongued invective.
Sounes’ portrait of an artist who slapped women, yanked fans by the hair and pulled knives on bandmates has stirred headlines on both sides of the Atlantic since its publication on October 22, and provoked a spirited Reed defence among fans and intimates.
His longtime wife and manager, Sylvia Reed (now Ramos), broke what she said was an 18-year media silence to dispute Sounes’ portrait for this article.
“That’s not a person I recognise,” Ramos said of the Lou Reed portrayed in the book. Many damning anecdotes, she added, seem to come from people Reed knew in the hazy, drug-fuelled 1970s “that I know for a fact were not capable of remembering anything they did in any given six-month period during that time, much less come back all these years later and say, ‘Oh, yes, I was there, this is what was going on.'”
Readers will have to decide whether the musician was simply a rock-and-roller taking a walk on the wild side or the disturbed individual Sounes portrays.
Through more than 140 interviews, Sounes, who has previously written biographies on Charles Bukowski, Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney, portrays a troubled genius whose antisocial tendencies were evident even from his early years in Freeport, New York.
Mental illness, Sounes says, was always a factor in Reed’s erratic behaviour. The book reports that Reed suffered his first nervous breakdown in his freshman year in college, which was quickly followed by his much-chronicled experience with electroshock therapy.
The treatment decimated his short-term memory and inspired “incredible rage” toward his parents, particularly his father, Sid, according to Reed’s sister, Merrill Reed Weiner. (Weiner, however, disputed her brother’s claim that the therapy was forced on him “to discourage homosexual feelings.” “My parents were many things — anxious, controlling — but they were blazing liberals,” she is quoted as saying.)
If Reed harboured deep-seated anger after this trauma, it was likely aggravated by his early experiences with fame — if such a word applies to his tenure in his seminal ‘60s band, the Velvet Underground.
The band’s albums are now considered among the most influential in rock history. But at the height of the hippie era, they were ignored by many critics and the public, which was more interested in flower power than the Velvets’ brooding art rock.
The failure to break through left him bitter, Sounes said in the interview: “He spent five years creating some of the most inventive and original music of the 1960s, and nobody cared. The week of the Woodstock festival, the Velvet Underground were playing at a roadhouse in Massachusetts.”
At a time when the rock world was entranced with kaleidoscope LSD visions, Reed was bingeing on speed and, as his bandmate John Cale has said, acting like a “queen bitch” and spitting out “the sharpest rebukes around.”
Even more damning are the book’s allegations of abusive behaviour toward women.
The guitarist Chuck Hammer recalled a 1979 concert in Germany, in which a woman climbed onstage during a tense standoff between Reed and a heckler. “Lou proceeds to drag her off the stage by her hair, and pushes her off the stage,” Hammer is quoted as saying. “She fell 15 feet — at least, at which stage a full-blown riot breaks out.”
Reed’s first wife, Bettye Kronstad, recalled him starting to binge on scotch every day around 3pm on tour. Sometimes, those binges turned violent.
“'We were on the road, and he was really drunk, and he would, like, pin you up against a wall and tussle you, like rough you up a little,” Kronstad is quoted as saying.
Once, he gave her a black eye, so she swung back at him: “It was pretty clear to me that the only way he would ever stop doing that was if I did it to him, so he’d have to walk on stage with a black eye.”
While Sounes’ book offers a detailed analysis of Reed’s music, as well as some flattering anecdotes, it is the dirt on Reed that has gained news media attention.
A recent article about it in The Daily Beast cited Reed’s derogatory reference to the fact that Bob Dylan is Jewish, and mentioned one anecdote in which Reed, in an interview with a journalist, referred to Donna Summer with a racial slur.
Coverage like that, Ramos said, describes a very different man from the one she was with for 18 years. “I was with him all those years,” she said. “I saw him through not only the intense cycle of drinking and drugs, but through nine lawsuits, which were extremely stressful, and his financial condition when I met him was terrible.”
“No matter how hard it got, I never had that behaviour from him,” Ramos said. She added that “he was never physically aggressive with me.”
Without question, Reed was capable of highly self-contradictory behaviour. In the 1970s, he publicly identified as gay, yet he went on to marry three women (“Notes” recounts Reed’s faux-wedding, complete with three-tiered cake, to his transgender partner, Rachel, in 1977). But Reed intimates found the idea that Reed was a “monster” unconvincing.
“Most talented people are horrible and wonderful simultaneously,” said Danny Fields, the writer and rock-scene fixture who briefly managed Reed.
When he received an advance copy of the book, Fields said, “I looked up my name in the index, read my quotes, sighed and put it on the shelf.”
His conclusion: “Poor Lou, his act worked too well.”
Legs McNeil, the writer who helped found Punk magazine in the ‘70s, said that Reed’s unhinged behaviour hardly stood out in a circle that included berserkers like Iggy Pop. “Everyone was on so many different drugs that their brains got scrambled,” he said. — The New York Times
